Given that the past of Goa has always been a site of conflict, it might be important to study how silence works within the scholarship on Goa, especially when it comes to its colonial rapture, caste, religion, ganvkaria, conversion and temples. These realities have become sites that inhabit a living past. It would be interesting to understand how caste has evolved and metamorphized over time. Even religion has evolved to our times and undergone a sea change. Here, we focus on temples and examine how what we understand as a temple has evolved and transformed in our time.
Reinhard Koselleck’s work on conceptual history does indicate that concepts change over time. Just like a text has logical geography that assigns the place for a sentence, a paragraph or a chapter within a book, we do have a logic of the geography of history. It is this logic of geography that assigns space for concepts, events, persons, places within history to suit a scheme of things. This ordering of concept, event, person and place within a scheme to fit a narrative is not innocent, and is profoundly political. This ordering does affect the way we understand concepts that define our history. The way we have ordered religion, caste, ganvkaria, conversion, and temples has certainly changed after the experience of colonial rapture. This order within which these concepts are placed or spaced also makes use of silence. Silence and silencing have an important role in the logic of geography of history. Gayatri Spivak has studied how silence and silencing as an absent presence has become a constitutive element of composing history. Her famous article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ opens up the imposed silences of subalterns at several levels.
The Temple is a sacred place of worship of our Hindu brothers and sisters. This reflection does not talk about the living temples—our people—but only tries to understand how the very notion of the temple that we imagine today is already highly developed and is different from the one at the time of colonization and before it. We cannot study temples in isolation from caste, conversion, ganvkaria, religion and the colonizer. They cross each other in our experience of the past as well as in our assumed logic of the geographies of our past. Staying with the temples we can see how a caste geography undergirded the temple entry and their administration even before the coming of the colonizers. We still have temples that do not allow lower castes to enter the holy of holies of the upper caste temples in Goa. These caste geographies do have their place within the entire logic of geography of history.
Temple history is also full of silences and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Temples in Goa have been both social, religious and political places. Even today they are sites of a wounded past and are politically milked by several forces. We seem to have forgotten the narrative of the emergence, spread and institutionalization of the temples in Goa and work with largely homogenized, positivist notions of temples as well as their pasts. Claims over the temple have been a major power assertion in the past. These claims are generated by naturalizing and normalizing the logic of geography of history. Hence, the silencing of the past serves power and produces a history on the side of the power elite. It is therefore important to understand the temporality as well geography of the notion of a temple. The temple today and the temple in the colonial era and even before that time were not the same, although the term (signifier) is the same. Its meaning, social and political economy, and religious significance (signified) has changed. This is because the logic of the geography of history ordered it differently over time. Hence, the history of the temples in Goa remains to be written. The present temple has at least two transitory stages. The first being Gramdevta temples and the other being Kulldevta temples. Both these stages have different logics of the geographies of history. It appears that the Gramdevta temples that housed a deity that belonged to the entire village evolved into a Kulldevta and got almost privatized to a particular clan. Even the orders of management of the temple shifted. All these also shifted the logic of geography of the temples. The Mazania Act of 1933 in fact legalised the logic of geography of the temples that is ruling them today.
When we consider the notion of a temple through a positivist lens, we fix its meaning and arrest its temporality and geography. This means we black box and delink it from gavkaria, religion, conversion, caste as well as orders of the logic of the geographies of history. The silencing of the temporality, and the logic of the geographies of history of the notion of temple have led to the domination of the temples by the upper castes as well as rendered these sacred spaces as sites of production of power. This is why it seems to be difficult to discern how the temples are spaces for religious identity production or caste assertion. The past operates in all societies. The power elite shapes that past to suit its interest. Thus, vested interests silence several pasts, and produce power and to a large extent invent history.
Perhaps we need a critical lens that will enable us to look at the silences produced by a positivist notion of temples that forgets their temporalities and geographies. It might enable us to view the Government’s allotment of a budgetary allocation to rebuild and discern the kind of logic of temporality and logic of geography ruling us today. It seems to say our time has come. Besides, it also manifests that there seems to be a deliberate effort to convert the temples of the past into sites of conflict and the assertion of political Hindutva. Maybe we have to look at the unwarranted Sancoale conflict in the same light and discern its political teeth. The rapture of colonization is used as a cover to produce a narration of history that forgets how the past is linked to the temporalities and geographies of caste, ganvkaria, conversion as well as the events of shifting of deities to new sites that were not under the control of the Portuguese. Erasing these entrenched links has craftily silenced a past and produced a history and its victims and villains. These missing links have produced a narration of the past that has several silences. The present effort to convert temples into sites of political contestation is not innocent. There is no question of running away from the disruptive past. We can embrace all shades of the past. We only have to be attentive to the fact that erasure of the past and selective spacing together of the wounds of the past to manufacture political capital also mimics the divisive imperialism of the colonizer.
(Fr Victor Ferrao is an independent researcher attached to St Francis Xavier Church, Borim, Ponda)